May 21, 2009 Thursday
I’m back. It’s said that to keep your mind fit, challenge it. So I signed up in November for a class in celestial navigation taught by the US Sail and Power Squadron/Skagit Bay. Now I’m not new to this concept of keeping the mind active. Although I have long moments of wondering why I’m doing this to myself. It all started several years back when a friend of mine signed up for Piloting class taught by the same folks. She wanted me to come to the first class and since I had taken a coastal navigation class (same as a piloting class), she wanted to know if this would be a good class. I stayed and she dropped out. I bonded with my instructor and more importantly with my classmates. So at the end of the class we all said, “of course you’re going to take Advanced Piloting” with such things as running fixes and vectors for set and drift to keep the cerebral juices flowing. I signed up. And once again at the end of THAT class we all asked if we were going to do Celestial Navigation (or as USSPS calls it Junior Navigation) together. Which we did.
Junior Navigation or JN for short is just the first of the two navigation courses taught with a year in between. JN only uses just the sun for its celestial body to determine where you are on the planet earth. I’ve never experienced such a love/hate relationship with a course of study. I loved the feel of a sextant in my hand and “bringing the sun down” to the horizon. Or doing “sun run sun” sights. I love the knowledge of the science and its long history, which until just 20 years ago was the only way to determine a vessel’s location. GPS is a very recent technology. A sextant and a clock plus a few books told you your spot on the surface of a very big body of water and where to steer for that speck of land in the middle of the ocean. I loved looking up the tables and filling in the forms. And I was in pure joy while doing this except when my dyslexia got in the way. And it was. This was the first time in my twenty years of education that I had to deal with my disability head on. I was not very nice to myself; to the point of having to apology to my neighbors for the total outbursts of frustration which I loudly and freely expressed. At severals points during the six month class I wanted to quit not because I didn’t understand the material or concepts but because in working the many tables I would mix the numbers up. This was hard for me to accept. And I sometimes really beat myself up. Very unhealthy……….
But I stuck it out for three reasons; my instructor, George Brooks, was the best. He was understanding and encouraging. He knew his subject down to the 100th decimal and showed and shared his love of it. The next reason was my classmates, which were very supportive of me. After all we had gone through a lot together over the past two courses and sitting in that college classroom with them was a very safe environment for me to make mistakes in; and the last reason for staying was the material with all of its centuries of history standing behind it. To see how it was done; to understand how it was done and to marvel at the magic of it all. To find your spot on this planet.
So the final JN exam is over and I got through it okay – I passed. And now the whispers start, “are you going to take the last of the four-course parade? Are you going to take “Senior Navigation”? Just near the end of JN that question came up and one of our classmates said he was going to go for it. Do the last of the chain. Everyone else rolled their eyes. At the end I said I was going to have a go of it. And now the hands start slowly to rise and say, “okay, I'm in”
There is a bond among us in that class. We have shared a lot. Both good and bad. The class itself has a personality and I think it wants to go for one last round.
